BEST-TRIED GLORY

That The Apocryphist is a fan of musical theater should be a surprise to no one who understands the unexpected ways the levers and pulleys of this world are manipulated. The Broadway musical is an occult thermometer of Western civilization’s internal temperature, stuck right up the keister of show business. As such, it is with nearly shrieking gleefulness that we regard today’s announcement of a major Broadway revival of West Side Story, performed in the original Spanish.

In this election year, no musical could possibly present itself as a better illustration of the riven state of our electorate. An updating of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Romeo y Julietta (which also served as the inspiration for a popular line of smokeables), it follows the doomed love of Antonio, a dark-skinned barrio resident, for Mary, a fair-haired bastion of a conservative family with the reputation for being a “maverick.” Their urban affair, which unfolds across the boulevards of western Los Angeles, involves the shooting of more dark-skinned people, and much debate about when and how to stop said shooting. The show’s finale climaxes in an epic escape in which Mary, an escaped prisoner of the enemy gang, is airlifted off the stage by a live helicopter effect while the noble Antonio remains below, fighting off both gangs simultaneously. This ambiguous ending may not sway people’s votes, but it is certainly a sign of the times, much as it was during the musical’s premiere during the Vietnam Era of the early 1970’s.

The creators’ decision to stage the show in its native language is a bold one, especially since so many of the show’s classic tunes (including “Proud Mary,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “(They’re Coming to) America”) have been radio hits in English. But it’s long been rumored that Spanish-speaking people (albeit very few from Spain) will be voting in the upcoming election, and it’s probably good to keep them entertained by the mainstream theater establishment, lest they grow restless and waste their votes on a third-party candidate. Hats off to you, Broadway (top hats!) for once again having your fabulous, gaunt, near-dessicated finger on the pulse of America!

MUSICAL MYSTERY TOUR

Normally our free-floating yet rigorous imagination prefers not to be hamstrung by redundant explorations of the same topic (especially because we utterly exhaust each topic’s essence in the few short paragraphs we devote to it), but on occasion a subject is so deeply relevant and rich in possibility that it requires a more in-depth meditation. Such a subject is the Tony awards.

As we hinted on Monday, few art forms say more about life as it is currently lived than the Broadway musical, and there is no more succinct and reliable snapshot of our times than its yearly ceremony of honors. (Straight plays remain and will always be little more than half-baked musicals, lacking in the essential fabulousness – comparable to reportage without facts, or cheese without milk.) We’ve already analyzed the nominees in the pivotal category of Best New Musical; now let us turn our attention to one that is arguably even more important, judging from Broadway’s defiantly retrograde tendencies: Best Revival of a Musical. The nominees are as follows:

• 110 in the Shade
• The Apple Tree
• A Chorus Line
• Company

First of all, let us point out how telling it is that, alphabetically speaking, none of these titles go past the letter C. The C is for “conservative”; these are deeply reactionary times that find Broadway holding back at the essentials – the ABC’s, as it were – thereby reflecting the national mood as a whole.

It’s also no accident that all of the nominated shows reflect Biblical themes. The most obvious is The Apple Tree, which takes the tale of Adam and Even as the starting point for a whimsical exploration of original sin. Less obvious, however, is 110 in the Shade, an encrypted retelling of the Deluge myth, in which a formerly repressed woman causes a massive flood by sinfully embracing the life of the body.

There are also secret evangelical overtones in A Chorus Line, with its group of wannabe dancers representing the population of the world, only a small number of which will be “raptured” away to musical-comedy success by an all-powerful director/deity. Rounding out the list is Company, Stephen Sondheim’s allegory for the life of Christ, in which the Messiah (played in this production by a mesmerizing Raul Julia) proves himself all too human by sleeping with and/or being jealous of his various disciples. To gather all of these semi-scriptural events under the rubric of “Revival” is merely the unpopped cherry on top.

It will be fascinating to see which aspect of Judeo-Christian legend the Tony committee will choose to designate as the zeitgeist. However, the die is essentially already cast – by favoring this particular worldview over all others, any winner will serve to support the status quo. And this is simply how the system works. In a sense, the Broadway musical represents a utopian eden, a mythological past during which mankind sang instead of speaking and danced instead of dying. The immense and epoch-making importance of this art form only confirms this primal dream of plenty.

Bearing all of this in mind, one should perhaps not be surprised that the Apocryphist’s heart belongs to the stage. We are only human, after all.

TONY TONY TONY

It is time for us to take a break from our work-imposed exile from the blogosphere to weigh in on one of the most salient reflections of contemporary culture available to those without a PhD. We refer, of course, to the Tony nominations.

Named for Marie “Antoinette” Perry, the nation’s first hard-nosed female theatre producer (whose penchant for firing artists at the drop of a hat led to the misplaced decapitatory overtones of her nickname), the Tonys are a yearly tradition in which Broadway congratulates itself for being so fabulous. The nominations for the 2007 awards were announced this year by actors Jane Krakowski and Taye Diggs as they skydived from a plane above Manhattan before a stunt parachute landing in the middle of Times Square.

Broadway babies have been predicting the nominees since well before any of the shows opened, meaning the result will have come as no surprise to those in the know. For the rest of the world, however, the list presents a fascinating matrix of the state of the world (at least the musicals do; nobody pays attention to the plays). Let us examine the shows that are in the running for Best Musical.

• Curtains
  In this musical adaptation of the hit television sitcom Frasier, David Hyde Pierce (playing, in a typical piece of Broadway stunt casting, the title role originated by Kelsey Grammar) goes from radio shrink to private eye to musical-theatre star and finally back to radio shrink when the whole thing turns out to be a dream. It is the final collaboration of Kander and Hammerstein, the duo responsible for such hits as South Chicago, The Cabaret and I, and The Sound of the Spider Woman. This show represents old people.
  
  
• Mary Poppins
  Remember how everybody loves movies and nobody loves theatre? Mary Poppins does, and she’s going to use a “spoonful of sugar” to make sure that people forget that truism while forking over $100 a ticket instead of slapping the film onto the end of the Netflix queue. For some reason things that happen right in front of you are more expensive than things that happened in the past that someone pointed a camera at. Anyway, this show represents children.
  
  
• Grey Gardens
  Another movie show, but this one based on an obscure documentary. The original film posits the theory that JFK was murdered by arrangement of his wife, Jackie O, and that she tried to frame her relatives, a couple of crazy old women on Long Island, for the crime. In this version, the crazy old women don’t actually kill JFK, but instead sit around their crumbling house singing about food and clothes. This show represents gay people.
  

• Spring Awakening
  Based on August Strindberg’s controversial play of the same name, this show is about how rock-and-roll originally emerged in late 19th-century Germany, only to be repressed by the Powers That Be for another sixty years. As with any show about of rock-and-roll, there is sex between underaged people, and power ballads. This show represents older people who wish they were still younger people.

As you can see, the entire span of humanity is represented by these four choices. If we feel like it, we’ll weigh in tomorrow on how the nominees for Best Revival of a Musical do the same thing, only in an even more cutting-edge fashion.